Buried in anonymity, boy gets his identity back

November 15, 2012|By Christy Gutowski, Chicago Tribune reporter

The gravestone of a boy found dead in a laundry bag in a field in Naperville Township in 2005 was updated last month to include his name, Atcel Olmedo. Atcel is buried at Assumption Cemetery in Wheaton. (Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune)

Five years after he was buried in a tiny white casket, the unidentified boy known as "DuPageJohnny Doe" no longer lies in a nameless grave.

The mystery behind how he died lingers, but on a recent fall day, authorities quietly gave him back his identity — Atcel Olmedo.

His name was carved into the marble that had long read: "Son. Unknown. But Not Forgotten."

"The tombstone says so much, 'Not forgotten,' and he isn't," said DuPage Coroner Pete Siekmann, who in one of his final acts in office before retiring this month pushed to make sure Atcel was publicly named.

"It was important to me that we could at least give him his identity back."

Authorities also refiled a death certificate in the toddler's name with the DuPage County Health Department.

His remains were found Oct. 8, 2005— he would have turned 3 the next month —in a drawstring laundry bag near a creek bed off Meadow and Ferry roads in Naperville Township. Experts determined that the boy died weeks earlier, but they could not pinpoint the cause of death because of decomposition.

In the months after the grisly discovery, the identity of the dark-haired boy remained a mystery despite national media exposure.

Two years later, after dozens of leads were exhausted, he was laid to rest at Wheaton's Assumption Cemetery in a donated casket the size of a toy chest. A teddy bear was tucked under the left arm of his blue blazer, and he was covered by a blue-and-white checkered blanket with stars, clouds and a little plane.

A message on the blanket read, "Sweet Baby Boy."

More than 100 community members and law enforcement officials gathered for the service in which Siekmann and DuPage County Sheriff John Zaruba served as pallbearers.

Six months after the funeral, in April 2008, sheriff's police caught a break. Detectives in Cicero wondered if DuPage's Johnny Doe could be connected to a local child abuse case they were investigating, according to a state agency report.

A Cicero girl on her 14th birthday told a social worker at Unity Junior High School that her stepfather was responsible for the cuts, bruises and welts that covered her body, the record states. The teen said he kicked her with his steel work boots, slapped her with an open hand or whipped her with a belt "almost every other day," the document said.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services immediately took the girl and her five younger siblings into protective custody after investigators found similar signs of physical abuse to two of the other children, state records said.

Later, safe in foster care, the girl asked police to find out what happened to her missing little brother. The teen said she last saw Atcel in Mexico before he left for the United States with their mother and stepfather while the others remained in Mexico with their grandmother, according to a U.S. Justice Department document. When the parents returned, Atcel was not with them. The girl said her grandmother told her in May 2006 that the stepfather and her mother had killed Atcel, put his body in a bag and "dumped him," according to the same report.

The family moved to the Chicago area sometime in 2006. The girl said she and her siblings were punished if they asked about their missing brother, state records said.

Acting on the Cicero tip, forensic experts obtained a DNA match after comparing the unidentified boy's remains with the genetic profile of another sibling, according to various documents. But by then, his mother and the stepfather had disappeared.

The man vanished after the child abuse allegations were reported and just before he was accused in a federal indictment of trafficking fake identification documents in the city's Little Village neighborhood, federal prosecutors said. The mother has an outstanding 2008 warrant alleging she endangered the life of her children for not intervening during the abuse, Cook County court records showed.

The Tribune is not naming them because neither has been charged in Atcel's death.

In February 2011, the Tribune revealed the boy's identity in a story, and then the Justice Department persuaded Mexican officials to try to find the boy's mother and stepfather. The couple is believed to have moved from Cicero to the Mexico City area in 2008, but they have not been found, local officials confirmed. Their whereabouts are still unknown to authorities.

The boy would have turned 10 last week. His six siblings range in age from 18 to 5 and still live in the Chicago area, officials said. They said the five youngest, adopted last year, are being raised together.

The oldest teen, who spoke out four years ago to ensure that Atcel didn't remain nameless, is now an 18-year-old high school graduate who is considering college.